2012 United States presidential election in Arizona
election in Arizona
The 2012 United States presidential election in Arizona took place on November 6, 2012, as part of the 2012 United States presidential election in which all 50 states plus the District of Columbia participated. State voters chose 11 electors to represent them in the Electoral College via a popular vote pitting incumbent Democratic President Barack Obama and his running mate, Vice President Joe Biden, against Republican challenger and former Massachusetts Governor Mitt Romney and his running mate, Congressman Paul Ryan. Prior to the election, all 17 news organizations considered this a state Romney would win, or otherwise considered as a safe red state. Arizona was won by Romney with a 9.06% margin. Obama is the only Democrat to ever win two terms without carrying the state at least once since the state's founding in 1912. Arizona is also one of only two states that voted against Obama in both 2008 and 2012 that his vice president Joe Biden would go on to win in 2020, the other being Georgia.
Until 2020, Arizona had been won by the Republican nominee for president in every election since 1952, except when Bill Clinton narrowly carried the state over Bob Dole in 1996. This is also the most recent time that Arizona has backed the losing candidate in a presidential election and the last time a Democrat won the presidency without winning Arizona.
Primary elections
Democratic primary
Incumbent President Barack Obama won all the delegates.
Republican primary
The Republican primary was a closed primary that took place on February 28, 2012.
This brief starts where responsible research should: with the source description of “2012 United States presidential election in Arizona” as election in Arizona. Everything that follows is an evidence route, not borrowed authority.
Why this record matters
The subject matters to the history & society register because the source frames it as election in Arizona. Its deeper value depends on whether names, dates, institutions and citations support that framing.
Contemporary correspondence, administrative files and participant testimony can test how later narratives organized the event or institution. The source revision retrieved here is dated Aug 27, 2026. The linked authority identifier is Q16161119. The first chronological checks are 2012, 1912, 2008 and 2020.
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This entry incorporates text from “2012 United States presidential election in Arizona” on English Wikipedia. Contributors are listed in the page history. Text is available under the Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 License. Selected authority identifiers and statements are retrieved from Wikidata under CC0; their references and qualifiers remain part of the verification path.